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Remaking modernity
Politics, history, and sociology
By Julia Adams Duke University Press
ISBN: 0-8223-3363-5
Chapter One
RICHARD BIERNACKI
The Action Turn? Comparative-Historical Inquiry beyond the Classical Models of Conduct
The recent breakdown of the foundational assumptions about human action inherited from classical social theory is feeding some of the most creative efforts in comparative-historical inquiries today. Through much of the 1980s, historical sociologists, whether they were inspired by Marx, Weber, or Parsons, called on a remarkably similar means-end model of conduct. In this model, an action is explainable because individuals start from a standing end and then select the reasonable means that they control for pursuing that end in the setting at hand. Ann Swidler once remarked that many utilitarian and culturalist theories of conduct, although putative opposites, actually "have a common explanatory logic, differing only in assuming different ends of action" (Swidler 1986: 276). This common explanatory logic is that of the means-end model. In the utilitarian theories of conduct, the ends comprise economic and political payoffs for a class or individual. In the culturalist theories, the ends are the fulfillment of values and normative worldviews.
Weber insisted on the primacy of means-end reasoning for interpreting human action even in his studies of religious culture. "In keeping with the law of marginal utility,"Weber wrote in his sociology of religion, "a certain concern for one's own destiny after death generally arises when the most essential earthly needs have been met, and thus this concern is limited primarily to the circles of the elite and to the wealthy classes" (M. Weber 1963: 140; emphasis added). In his defense of The Protestant Ethic, Weber said the inhumanly severe Calvinists did not display a unique psychology, merely a unique understanding of a goal, salvation, and of the means for pursuing it. It is enough to assume, Weber said, that "people of that past era possessed very concrete notions of what awaited them after their death and of the means to improve their luck in this respect, and that they directed their action thereby" (M. Weber 1982: 33). The convergence of Weber and Marx on the means-end model let Craig Calhoun put their perspectives on workers' collective action into easy dialogue in The Question of Class Struggle (1982: 218-219). From both perspectives, after all, if culture influences action, it does so principally by structuring the objectives that agents recognize and the costs of pursuing them.
Today investigators are dramatically upending these inherited models of action. In her research leading to Talk of Love, Ann Swidler (2001: 82-83) aimed to show how we are misled by the commonsense assumption that ends-the fundamentals for which action is undertaken-are the primary independent variable guiding action and preserving human autonomy. Her studies of the ethic of "individualist voluntarism" in the United States suggested that culture influences conduct primarily by crystallizing the problem-solving repertoires on which people draw, not by fixing final ends. The repertoires precede the choice of ends. They delimit the challenges that agents choose to deal with, and they lend actions similar styles of organization even when the ends of the action vary. Building from a critique of Weber's theory of action, Mustafa Emirbayer (forthcoming) has arrived at a similarly subversive agenda for research. Genuinely reasoned action, in his view, is organized not just as a rational adjustment of means to ends, but also as a process in which emotion and habit constitute an agent's appreciation of the environment and the openings through which he or she responds. Just as fundamentally, Hans Joas has tried to show how ends and means emerge together from the agent's ongoing appreciation of the situation at hand: "The concept of 'situation,'" Joas concluded, "is a suitable replacement for the means-ends schema as the primary basic category of a theory of action" (1996: 160). These innovators have not ruled out completely the contribution of autonomously chosen goals, as behaviorist psychologists once tried. They have instead delimited how goals fit compellingly into sociological explanation.
This widespread questioning has redirected comparative historical explanations of action in periods of epochal change. In his research about the influence of the Protestant Reformation on state building, Philip Gorski (forthcoming a) focused on the templates for officeholding that Protestantism introduced rather than on the shifts in the inward goals of religious reverence. Likewise, through an extraordinary comparative study of the emergence of individuality in Russia across the caesura of the revolution, Oleg Kharkhordin uncovers the disguised continuities in religiously defined repertoires for recognizing personhood. Even the cutthroat deeds of Stalin, he shows, were structured by cultural formulas for the relation of self to the collectivity, not by the optimal pursuit of power (Kharkhordin 1999: 195, 230). In these signpost studies of reformation and revolution, culture influences the course of change by reconfiguring the practices by which individuals coordinate their ties to each other and to the state, not by transforming meaningful life ends. The ferment in theories of action is reshaping the practice of historical explanation on the ground.
If it is premature to forecast the destinations that novel inquiries into action will reach, the intriguing question is how we assess their potentials in the current state of play. My thesis is that debates about the role of goals in action would benefit by evaluating the competing models as modes of research practice, not just as arguments about the real precedence of variables. The essay proceeds in three steps. The first is preparatory: I identify the features of the approach that offers the purest contrast case to the goals model because it inverts three founding premises. By taking a look at this alternative, in which action is analyzed as a problem-solving contrivance, we can discern how disparate historical investigations have actually followed the same path toward replacing the goals model. In the second part I over an intensive illustration of the practices of explanation that follow the problem-solving model of action. I conclude by summarizing the returns to research from the two alternative models. Viewing action as a local contrivance offers profound methodological advantages in the use of evidence.
Reversing Three Premises of Action
The means-end model of classical social theory holds three premises that create a distinctive model of goal-directed action. The first premise that the problem-solving model of action reverses is that agents' goals are general, fixed prior to their encounter with the setting, but that the means of action are particular to the setting. Rather than treat goals as the general, transferable component of action that agents maintain across the particularities of diverse settings, the problem-solving model treats the goals of action as situationally specific, nontransposable elements of action. It focuses on the repertoires and schemas for practice as the constitutive elements of action about which we try to generalize. A pioneer study, Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, powerfully illustrated the power of this reversal of the particular and the general. In his account of scientific conduct, Kuhn (1970: 37-38) bracketed goals that transcend the particularity of the moment, such as the discovery of truth or long-range professional rewards. The operative goals in his view are embedded within and inseparable from peculiar, concrete scientific puzzles at historical junctures of play. Kuhn opened up the intriguing possibility that it may prove adequate to abstract action's "means"-the know-how for identifying problems and heuristics for approaching their solution-for sociologists to characterize and explain conduct. More radically, the means of action in Kuhn's histories of science subsume action's goals, because scientific paradigms inculcate techniques both for identifying puzzles and for attempting their solution (Kuhn 1970: 52-53).
The second tenet that the model of action as a problem-solving contrivance overturns is the premise that agents organize their action by integrating the proximate goals to be pursued in a particular setting within a system of more distant, final goals. In this goals model, agents organize their action rationally when the local arena of action is subordinated to an omnipresent hierarchy of goals. "It can be safely concluded," Parsons wrote in a preliminary sketch for the Structure of Social Action, "that precisely in so far as the action of an individual is guided by rational choice, its ultimate ends are to be thought of as constituting an integrated system. Rationality of action for an individual implies just as much the working-out of such a coherent system of ends as it does a rational selection of means" (1935: 295). In The Protestant Ethic, Weber solved this problem of the ranking of goals by treating salvation as a supreme, sincerely held goal that did not have to be balanced against others. The necessities imposed by an encompassing architecture of means-end relations shift the agents' scope of freedom upward, away from local ingenuity and inventive construal of challenges toward the choice of only the highest, final ends. In The Protestant Ethic, the form taken by ascetic labor in a calling is fixed by the need to rationally adjust to the conditions of a functionally specialized setting, one in which purely capitalist institutions are already in place (M. Weber 1958: 67-68). In a striking illustration of the logic of the goals model of action, both Parsons and rational choice theorists started by assuming that the conditions of the environment are objectively observable or unambiguously fixed. Parsons (1949: 418) treated the environment of action as a kind of observable given so that the ultimate goals the agent pursues are the exclusive source of free self-determination. Similarly, most rational choice theorists work from models of unambiguous game conditions in which the agents' identification of the conditions is taken for granted.
If we view action as a problem-solving contrivance, then the autonomy and ambiguity of the local setting, not its systematic integration into a hierarchy of objectives, sets up an arena for the agent to act with deliberation. The setting is a structure partially independent of prior goals and know-how because it is never automatically typifiable-never, say, unambiguously reducible to an instance of capitalist profit maximization, as it sometimes is for Weber (N. Z. Davis 1999: 73). The agent has to construe the features of the setting and the correspondingly appropriate problem-solving approach. For example, in his study of methods of geometrical proof in the seventeenth century, Amir Alexander (2002: 160-161, 186-187) has shown how the definition of a mathematical discovery and the criteria for appropriate solutions drew upon the transfer of cartographic and narrative repertoires already in use in the literal voyages of discovery. The setting of pure geometry nonetheless held its own autonomy, because the properties of points and lines carried their own suggestive challenges and opportunities for mathematicians. The extreme case of pure mathematics is an archetype for showing how a self-constituting game neither imposes its own problems on agents nor flows from the agents' choice of supervening goals. It shows how the rationality of action consists above all in how the agent typifies the setting, not just in calculation of means. The typification may consist of a new blend of characterizations when the dimensions of the setting activate diverse issues at once. For example, a recent blend, the label "same-sex marriage," calls up multiple repertoires for resolving the rights and roles of gays. The combination calls on the public, legitimizing repertoires of traditional marriage; the new technologies for conception and family reproduction; and templates for recognizing sex, love, and child rearing apart from gender (Fauconnier and Turner 2002: 269-270).
A third constituent of the goals model that an investigator using the problem-solving model of action turns upside down is the supposition that agents' rational action results from or is best represented as their internal reasoning to a logical conclusion. In the reasoning behind the agents' action, the goal given prior to the setting serves as the major premise, and the particularities of the means in the setting serve as minor premises. The conclusion about the optimal course of conduct that agents derive from these premises operates as the internal motor of acts. The issue is not that the goals model is obviously "unrealistic" or overly intellectual. Nor is my concern that of the relative empirical distribution in daily life of freshly calculated versus routinized actions. Instead, at the level of theory, the issue is the relation of the goals model to temporal process and the resulting necessity the goals model aims to establish between action and its causes in adequate explanations. If we view action as the consequence of the agents' conclusions once they relate means to ends, then we connect the reasons standing behind the action by placing them on a tableau within an analytically frozen instant. For instance, theorists assume that if we prefer A to B and B to C but the means used to reach A in a particular setting are more costly than the means for reaching C, the balance of reasons and the outcome can be frozen in a table or in a series of if-then premises. The "conclusion" is the motive of the act. The interrelations among the premises and the logical necessity leading from the premises to the conclusion are synchronic. As everyone knows, Weber in The Protestant Ethic inferred the inescapable consequences of Calvinism once he combined its novel theology with the economic institutions in place and with individuals' limited tolerance for anxiety. Weber saw neither the process of turning the motivation into action nor the orchestration of the acts as practices through time as problems requiring confirmatory evidence of their own.
With the alternative model of action as a problem-solving contrivance, investigators show only that the selected features of the action are apt, given the agents' characterizations of the setting. They do not dissect the act as if it resulted from a conclusion the agent drew prior to the act. They accept instead that since an agent's reflections flow through time, they are never unified in one instant. The temporal process of imagining first one course of action in its setting, then a second, then returning to the initial one may change the definition and valuation of the initial course. Economists and rational choice theorists confront instances in which individuals prefer A to B and B to C but not, as the individuals' comparisons unfold and reshape the construals of the objects, A to C (M. Turner 2001: 94). Just as important, the agent often holds on to multiple, partially inconsistent typifications of the setting rather than encoding the setting univocally for solution of one preeminent problem.
The differences between the two opposite approaches in method raise broader questions about our understandings of agency and rationality. In the goals model, the autonomy and priority of goals vis-a-vis the empirical features of the environment are key to preserving the autonomy of human agency. With action as a problem-solving contrivance, however, we discover agency in individuals' creative construal of puzzles and in their unforeseen transposition and modification of schemas. The felicitous interplay between a puzzle and its solution, not the free commitment to a transcendent goal, is agency's hallmark. In the goals model, a univocal reading of the setting and its constraints encourages rational deliberation among alternatives. In the problem-solving model, to the contrary, action is most reflective and rational when hybrid or ambiguous features of the setting provoke the agent to blend repertoires selectively and to cope with multiple challenges in a single process.
A Case Example of the Problem-Solving Model
To illustrate the distinctive, interlocking features of research that result from so inverting the three founding premises of the goals model, let me revisit one of the celebrated art histories from Michael Baxandall's (1985) Patterns of Intention. In his marvelously detailed analysis of how the Renaissance artist Piero della Francesca composed the painting Baptism of Christ, Baxandall self-consciously adhered to a model of action as a problem-solving contrivance. In his portrayal, a great artist's chief task is to clarify the challenges of the assignment, taking in both the most immediate aesthetic challenges of the composition and the fragility of the generally available techniques of pictorial representation.
(Continues...)
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